MARINE DECAPOD CRUSTACEANS OF THE CAROLINAS 



By Austin B. Williams 



University of North Carolina Institute of Fisheries Research, 

 Morehead City, North Carolina 



INTRODUCTION 



Knowledge of the crustacean fauna of the Caro- 

 linas has grown slowly over many decades. Early 

 in the last, century, Thomas Say described species 

 from the Carolinas, and in the middle 1800's Pro- 

 fessor L. R. Gibbes, who maintained a private 

 collection in Charleston, S.C., described species 

 from the Carolinas. William Stimpson (1860b), 

 who visited Beaufort, N.C., in company with T. N. 

 Gill, gave a list of 38 species of decapod crus- 

 taceans which he collected there. Elliott Cones 

 (1871), at that time an Army surgeon stationed 

 at Fort Macon, N.C., recorded 27 species of deca- 

 pods from the Beaufort area, 8 of which were 

 additions to Stimpson's list. Seven years later, 

 Coues and Yarrow (1878) gave a list of six 

 species, two of which had not appeared previously. 

 An appendix to the same paper by J. S. Kingsley 

 included 51 species from the Beaufort area, and 

 3 of these were additions to the fauna. A year 

 later, Kingsley (1870) contributed eight more new 

 records. 



The collection which was the subject of Kings- 

 ley's report had been made by Professor H. E. 

 Webster, of Union College. It was later trans- 

 ferred, in part at least, to the U.S. National 

 Museum, and supplied the types of Lepldopa 

 ■websteri Benedict and Pinnixa cristata Rathbun, 

 both collected near Beaufort, N.C. 



Professor W. K. Brooks and his students, of the 

 Johns Hopkins University, studied crustaceans 

 at Beaufort at intervals from 1880 to 1903. They 



Note. — Approved for publication May 25. 1964. 



contributed information on habits and develop- 

 ment, but only one or two new species were added 

 to the faunal list. 



Shore's manuscript included 87 species, but he 

 omitted 8 which had been listed by the writers 

 already mentioned. He had added 33 species, 

 making a total of 95 species for the region. 



Following this, exploratory work on offshore 

 fishing banks by the Fish Hawk in the summers 

 of 1914 and 1915, energetic shore and shallow- 

 water collecting by parties from the Bureau of 

 Fisheries laboratory at Beaufort, and inclusion of 

 freshwater species from the region, enabled Hay 

 to add 57 species to Shore's list. These, plus de- 

 scription of a new species by Rathbun, brought 

 the total number known from Beaufort, N.C, in 

 1918 to 153 species. 



The authors pointed out that some of these 

 species had not yet been reported from the area, 

 though from distribution elsewhere they might 

 be expected. Also, some of the species were con- 

 sidered more properly to be deep-sea forms, rather 

 than strictly members of the Beaufort fauna, 

 although they had been found on the continental 

 shelf not far distant. 



In the year the handbook appeared, Mary J. 

 Rathbun brought out the first in a series of four 

 monographs on recent crabs of the Western Hemi- 

 sphere, and, thus, began a new advance in knowl- 

 edge of Carolinian crustaceans, later furthered 

 by major revisions of the Penaeidae by Burken- 

 road, revisions of Hippolytidae, Palaemonidae 

 and Scyllaridae by Holthuis, Galatheidae by 



FISHERY BULLETIN : VOLUME 65. NO. 1 



1 



